Thursday, March 7, 2013

VP8 and MPEG LA

Today Google Inc. and MPEG LA, LLC announced agreements that will result in MPEG LA ending its efforts to form a VP8 patent pool.
The arrangement with MPEG LA and 11 patent owners grants a license to Google and allows Google to sublicense any techniques that may be essential to VP8 and are owned by the patent owners; we may sublicense those techniques to any VP8 user on a royalty-free basis. The techniques may be used in any VP8 product, whether developed by Google or a third party or based on Google's libvpx implementation or a third-party implementation of the VP8 data format specification. It further provides for sublicensing those VP8 techniques in one successor generation to the VP8 video codec.
We anticipate having the terms of our sublicense ready in the next few weeks. When those terms are ready we will blog about them here, so watch this space.
We launched the WebM Project in May 2010 with the goal of providing the web with a high-quality, open, royalty-free video codec that anyone can use, and that can inspire future innovators. Today's announcement is an important step toward that goal.
Matt Frost is Senior Business Product Manager for the WebM Project.